February was cold and excessively snowy in most parts of the US, but neither rain, nor sleet nor — yeesh, you know the rest — could keep the accounting industry from hiring lots of workers.

Accounting?

Yes, that’s what the government said Friday.

If you are good with numbers and have a sharpened pencil, you apparently had an easy time finding work in February. (Now, kids, don’t go changing your major because of one month.)

If you earn a living doing anything else, you are probably still pounding the pavement.

The Labor Department on Friday announced that 175,000 new jobs were created in February. While that number would be considered only moderate growth in normal times — remember the last time things were “normal?” — it was still far better than the experts had been predicting.

Wall Street was expecting a gain of 152,000.

The curious part about the 175,000 jump was that 79,000 of those new jobs came in the professional and business services category. Almost 16,000 of the jobs hatched in that category were accounting and bookkeeping services.

Custodians also did well, with 11,400 new jobs. Someone, I guess, had to shovel all that snow.

Labor also added a total of 25,000 new jobs in January and December as it revised the results for those two months.

While most on Wall Street and Main Street will view the job creation numbers over the last three months as slightly positive news, let me tell you the truth — they are pathetic, at an average of 129,000. Over the past 12 months, which were nothing to write home about, the average was 180,000, according to Labor.

Labor also announced that the unemployment rate rose to 6.7 percent, from 6.6 percent. Even as the pencil pushers at the Federal Reserve remain fixated on this statistic, I’m telling you to ignore it.

The jobless rate moves up and down for the wrong reason. By government definition, the jobless rate declines when people have given up looking for jobs. And it rises when people start getting encouraged about the economy and try to re-enter the labor force.

Besides, I haven’t completely figured out yet how much this figure has been manipulated over the past few years.

Yes, it has been manipulated. I just don’t know by how much, although I think I’m starting to figure out that answer. Don’t change your channel. I might have news on this next week.

The stock market didn’t know what to make of Friday’s somewhat encouraging but still weak jobs report. The results were too muddled; I understand that.

But upcoming jobs reports will make it a lot clearer for stocks — and that ain’t good.

We are coming into the spring period during which Labor makes wildly optimistic assumptions about jobs being created by newly formed businesses, whether or not Washington can substantiate that optimism.

The February figures, for instance, included 124,000 not-seasonally adjusted jobs that Labor can’t prove actually exist.

And the odds favor good employment growth — especially in the category of “phantom jobs” — over the next three months.

With the jobs picture getting a bit brighter through spring, investors will pull back over fears the Fed will continue to pull back on its massive bond buys.